Office Pioneer

I know, I know, as bloggers we've really fallen off the wagon. I could bore you with my excuses but I don't want to test your patience any further!

This is however the last official post of the Office Pioneers. From today, the 2007 Microsoft Office system is now publically available to companies and consumers worldwide. If you've enjoyed the Beta experience then you can now either run out and buy a copy for yourself or sign up for a free 60 day trial.

A couple of technical things to note:

1. You'll need to re-save any document created by the Beta products in the 97-2003 format. The 2007 release is NOT able to open documents created by the Beta code.

This is a pain, but essential because of point 2:

2. Uninstall the Beta code before trying to install the 2007 trial.

The catch of course is, if you skip step 1 and go straight to step 2, you can't open any of your Beta documents and unless you've kept your Beta installation files, you've got no way of reinstalling it. Don't say you weren't warned!

You also need to act quite fast on this - the Beta program starts to "time-bomb" on Thursday 1 February. If you didn't install the Technical Refresh patch, then your Beta products will only operate in reduced functionality after this date. And among the other things that "reduced functionality" won't let you do, you can't save documents. So don't delay!

If you did install the Technical Refresh patch, then you have until the end of March before your product time-bombs, so you've got a bit longer - but to be honest, now that the finalised product is available as a free trial, I'd be switching over straight away.

Biased though I might be, the completed product is a joy to use. I've been running the 2007 release (in one form or another) since November 2005 and, while there have been plenty of ups and downs on the journey, I wouldn't go back to Office 2003.

If you've enjoyed the postings from our blog, please sign up to the free Microsoft "At Work" newsletter - it's published monthly and is full of hints, tips and how-to articles to help you get more out of Microsoft Office (whichever version you have).

Thanks for joining us on this journey into the unknown! Today the Office Pioneers reached their destination.

As I've probably said before, I'm a big fan of OneNote and rely on it to keep all my meeting notes, project ideas and random jottings in one place. As a result I've got a vast array of notes made up of all sorts of types of content: my handwriting, typed comments, copied PowerPoint slides, and "print outs" of other documents such as Word files or PDFs.

All of which could make retrieving information a bit tricky, were it not for the amazing scope of the OneNote search facility in the 2007 release. (And if I'm waxing lyrical a bit too much for your taste, then, yes, I should confess that this particular feature got me out of a sticky situation only this afternoon.)

With the new Optical Character Recognition, there's nothing left that OneNote can't search. So now it doesn't matter whether the great insight you recorded was an idea you scribbled in a meeting, or written on the slide that you copied, or even on a picture that you took and stuck into OneNote - the search capability will find it all.

Under Beta 2 (or at least B2TR), Outlook has apparently developed a severe case of saving paranoia.

Almost everything I open - and contacts in particular - seems to think it's been changed. So when I go to close the item in question, I get prompted to save.

Now I like the save prompt, and it's certainly saved my skin several times in the past, but this is starting to get ridiculous. This morning I opened up a contact, looked at the phone number (I swear, I didn't even click into a different field with my mouse) and when I hit Escape to close the contact, up popped the save prompt.

I suspect that this is probably more annoying on a Friday than it might be on a Tuesday...

Forgot to let you know, if you do have any Beta hints, tips or stories about how it is changing the way you do things, please drop an email to atworkuk@microsoft.com to reach Gill and me :-)

Whilst reading Bad Language, I came across this really good reminder of something that I totally take for granted in Beta. Word Count in Word 2007 - now appears constantly at the bottom of your Word window

This reminded me of an instance in the office last week, someone shouted across the floor "Where the h*** has word counter gone?!". Calmly my manager replied "Look at the bottom left hand corner of your screen". You see, in the Marketing Communications team, word count is often quite important to us so I guess this was one of the first things that me and my colleagues quickly figured out.

This led me to think of a comment from another one of my colleagues "I don't need to know all that detail of that branding stuff, I know you'll know off the top of your head".

Warped thinking as this might be (when you are a believer that everyone in an organisation should be a brand advocate), he is right, that's why we work in sometimes quite complex virtual teams, so that we have subject matter experts.

To get to the end of my train of thought, and ultimately my point, I have started to think about all the really cool things about the Beta that I am probably missing just because of the way I work and the type of work that I do. So, it would be really great to hear from any of you about any of the big or small things in the Beta that have really helped the way you work, it may seem blatantly obvious to you, but chances are it might not to loads of people :-) 

This is not really related to the 2007 release. In fact, it's more of a nod to my Vista team mates.

I'm sitting in a training course, trying to plan out my answer to an assignment that I have to complete. The assignment is related to my work and I know that I wrote a draft plan, back in April, that contains a huge chunk of relevant information. The only problem - that was over six months ago and I haven't a clue what the document was called or where to find it.

So I start hunting around my document folders and I can't see any sign of it in any of the "likely" places I would have filed it. But the more I think about it, the more I think the document probably had "O2007" in the title.

Cue the Vista search engine. In a few seconds I've got all the results I could want - including at least two instances of the document I'm looking for. Not only has Vista search found a version of the document in an email that I sent to a colleague, it's also found the document on my "My Site" (a SharePoint repository where I don't even remember storing it).

Smiles all round.

This is a B2TR bug-bear of mine (I can't remember whether or not it was a problem in plain B2).

I'm typing away, powering through some work, and then I need to make a change. Say, I think of a word that better expresses what I'm trying to convey. So I hit undo (ctrl+Z because I'm working on the keyboard) and start to continue typing.

Not so fast. Undo hasn't undone. Or at least not completely. It's canceled the last letter I typed. I hit undo again and another letter disappears. Not such a problem when I want to replace "talk" with "presentation", but when it's the other way around, it's a real pain.

I think I have mentioned in previous blog posts that I am a compulsive "filer" in the filer versus piler debate.

I don't tend to have a busy desktop or an inbox with 2000 messages, my desktop and inbox only really have emails and documents that I am working on currently.

So, the well known problem of searching has never really been an issue for me, I tend to know where things are, and just a few clicks will take me to the folder in My Documents or my inbox. However... recently my inbox has become far more complex and the matrix like structure of work means that emails have ended up in sometimes random folders. I have ended up with somewhere between 40 and 60 folders, which is spread across my Inbox and Outlook .pst files.

In Beta 2, I could not use the Outlook search feature because there was a known bug which meant that it did not (in some cases) allow you to extend searches to your .pst files - rendering the feature useless to me really, having about 80% of my emails in .pst files.  

But now that I have upgraded to the Technical Refresh, I am revelling in Outlook search :-) It's so easy just to type in the name of the person who sent you the email or the subject, or something you think might be in the body text and then just select the option to search in all Mail Folders if the mail is not in the folder that you are currently in.

I really thought that search was only for the pilers among us, but it seems that it can really help us over- complicated filers too. I'll have to see how I find the very cool search in all the different places in Windows Vista now that I have taken the brave plunge in to Release Candidate 1 :-)

Beta software inevitably has bugs. That's part of the "deal" and a part that I'm usually pretty happy with. More often than not there's a workaround or the bug isn't such a big deal and you can cope.

But not since the very early days of Beta 1 (long before the beta went public) have I come across a bug as infuriating as this one. OneNote (which next to Outlook is indispensable in my life) couldn't keep up with my typing.

Now I'm a pretty fast typist (if I say so myself), but even when I slowed down to a lazy pace, it didn't improve. I might have typed "Beta software inevitably has bugs" but what I got was more like "Ba soware inevitably s bugs". Not only was this extremely annoying, it was massively inefficient and I was taking three times as long to type anything. And by the time I got to the end of a paragraph some of the sentences were so mauled as to be unrecognisable.

In despair, I mentioned this to a colleague. "Ah yes," he replied sagely. "That's a known issue."

Oh great, I sulked. Like that's meant to make it any better. You're still stuck with the problem, but it magically becomes more bearable because other people know about it. I don't think so...

Well in this case, I was happily proved wrong. The fact that "other people", namely the product team, knew about it did make a difference, because in this instance they've come up with a work-around.

The "slow typing" issue has been addressed (I won't say fixed just yet) - you can avoid the problem by closing the "drawing tools" and "my pens" toolbars. Simple as that.

Working with Beta 2, all my attention tends to be focused on what's new and how it's changing - and usually improving - the way I work.

What's harder to spot is the stuff that's gone away, particularly when it's been seamlessly replaced with a new approach. And to my mind that's a good thing - it shows that the new approach has taken hold and that I'm not pining after old functions.

Today I came across a great example of this when I was reminded of floating toolbars. At the time (way back in 1996) they were a giant leap forward and an attempt to conquer the proliferation of functions and features, all looking for somewhere to hang out.

And as much as they brought some order to potential feature chaos, I will always remember them with a degree of hassle and frustration as they moved around the screen, disappeared when I didn't want them to and then kept popping up in strange places.

It took me a minute to link the unruliness of floating toolbars with the simplicity and clarity provided by the ribbon. I can hardly believe that they're essentially the same function, which speaks volumes for the improvements made by the new approach.

OK, so we've been a bit quiet recently, but my excuse for the last week is that I updated my system and been running Beta 2 Technical Refresh, which I wasn't allowed to talk about until today. And as we've spent the last week in the office getting far too excited about some of the improvements in B2TR, it was hard to think of anything else to write about! (Yeah, I know, as excuses go, that's right up there with "the dog ate my homework"...)

But at last, the news is out: Beta 2 Technical Refresh is here and publically available.

This update to Beta 2 addresses a whole stack of the problems that have been uncovered as part of the Beta testing and personally I was really pleased to see some significant improvements, in particular to performance times. (At last, I no longer have to go and grab a drink while I'm waiting for other people's calendars to load in Outlook!)

It's really quite impressive to see the way in which so much of the public feedback has been incorporated into the product. A prime example of this is to do with the ribbon and the way in which it works when you minimise it - there are some big changes here, primarily as the result of the feedback from all the beta testers worldwide.

Some logistical details: B2TR is available free of charge as a patch, so you install it on top of the beta software you already have. The US preview site has links to all the patches: you can get the Office patch here, and this page has all the available patches. Remember, if you haven't installed the beta software you need to do this first!

If you want to read more about B2TR, Jensen Harris has a great post detailing many of the changes made and eWeek have already put B2TR through its paces.

I'll blog more about the various changes and improvements to B2TR next week. In the meantime, get out there and try it for yourself!

Another from Chris...

One of the things that we're very good at doing at Microsoft is testing our own products - we call it "eating our own dog food" and it leads to a fairly rollercoaster like experience.

Darren Strange has a great post about the "beta life" and the upshot of this is that it's not uncommon to install a later build or version of a product.

Moving builds is a little rollercoaster like, but then that's part of the fun.  It's interesting to see what gets changed along the way.  Sometimes you can install a newer build and find that something now works that hasn't really worked before - such as publishing internet calendars that I could never get to work in previous builds.

Equally, some things get removed, moved or stop working, which is a bit less fun, but then that's exactly the point of us using the products - to catch these little issues - and it's also part of the beta journey that helps us understand the products and their development better.

This can lead to confusion - when is something a bug that doesn't work as it should, and when is it a deliberate decision about that feature?

Well I'm pleased to announce that Gill's bug bear Has been fixed in a later build of Office.  Now you can copy text from the live preview within Outlook - and Gill can get home for dinner :-)

Another one from Chris R....

One of the core ideas behind the new user interface is that people like to see what they're gong to get before they actually get it.  This makes perfect sense to me - it's much easier to look at a picture and see it' what you want, rather than having to translate a list of options "Arial, Size 18, Underlined, Italic, Embossed, Red" into what that might actually look like.

This idea has given us Galleries, and Live Preview (to read about these as written by the man that led the team designing them - go here) which does make choosing between options so much easier.

But - what if you do something very regularly that isn't in the gallery? 

Then you want to customise the gallery - which for most things is really easy to do.

Let's say that I write documents that use a particular style of heading a lot, so I want that heading style to appear on the ribbon in the styles gallery.

All I need to do, is format my text into the format that I want - something like this:

My Custom Heading

Select my text and choose "Save Selection as a new quick style" in the styles gallery.

And lo and behold, my style now appears in my gallery.

And if you want to delete it, simply right-click on the quick style you want to remove, and "Remove from the quick style gallery

As you can probably tell from the title, this is not my blog posting :-) bringing the Office Pioneer blog to you today from Chris Rothwell:

Hello - I'm your supply-blogger while Gill takes a well earned holiday, I'll be posting a few things that that I like around the 2007 release of the Office system that I've been using for a while now...

... from my email. Now, a process that has become much easier, thanks to the improved  "signature" feature in Outlook.

I can't really remember how you switched between Outlook signatures manually in previous versions, but I do remember that it was too much hassle and I never bothered. Although I did have rules set up for having different signatures on emails I sent and emails I replied to, much easier to do.

But now, the manual switching has become really simple. On the "Message" tab in your Outlook message (the default tab), in the "Include" section, you will find a "Signature" button, which allows you to pick whichever of your signatures you like and changes it right there on your mail message, so now you can change your signature from the message in just two clicks.

Check out Allister Frost's blog for tips on creating the perfect sign off. And be smug that you don't need to follow the menu structure instructions to create/edit a signature, just click on the "Signature" button and choose the signature drop down :)